That’s not fair!

I have this crazy idea that when you have a serious illness, you should get an exemption from other shitty stuff happening to you. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem that God got that particular memo, because I know plenty of people who have more than one shitty thing going on at the same time. So, it got me wondering about the whole concept of fairness, because in my mind, that is really unfair. And fairness is something that we consider to be kind of a kid's thing don't we? But I'm not sure that we ever grow out of it; I think we just do a better job at hiding it. And I'll admit it; I do it all the time. For example, I keep buying those stupid lotto scratch-off tickets. Somewhere in the recesses of my brain I think that, really I should win, because don't I deserve it more than most people? Isn't it only fair?

And I think the fairness thing works the other way too. You know, the whole schadenfreude thing. You gotta love the Germans; who else would have a word for taking pleasure in the misfortune of others? Because I think that in our elementary school minds, that's a fairness thing too. When something bad happens to someone else, guy trips, neighbor loses her job, the cousin that you never liked much gets sick, well you probably wouldn't admit it to anyone else, but sometimes there's this little twinge of feeling that maybe that person deserved it. This is quickly followed by the thought that whatever the shitty thing is, it would never happen to me. That wouldn't be fair at all.

Of course, if we let ourselves think about it, any of these things really could happen to us. In fact, all of us are just a heartbeat away from a lot of potential shitty things knocking at our door late at night. That is precisely why we don't often let ourselves think about it. So the fairness concept that we might have thought we left behind in grade school, is probably right there with us still. I remember having a conversation with one of those new-agey healing people. She didn't know that I had a degenerative illness, but we both had attended the same new-agey school, so I'm sure she assumed that I was a like-minded individual. Well she kept going on and on about how health is the natural state of the human body and if we could just accept that, believe that, then we'd all be perfectly healthy and well for the rest of our lives. At one point I asked her, so what do you do when you work with someone with a serious illness who isn't down with the concept that they're responsible for their illness? That must be difficult. She misunderstood the intent of my question and said something along the lines of, yes, it's always hard to work with someone who is resistant.

Ah, resistance, my favorite word. I have a masters degree in clinical psychology and as a student, we all loved the concept of resistance. Because, while it is of course a real live defense mechanism, it can also be really convenient for the person on the other end of the couch. Say you've been working with someone for awhile, you're pretty darn positive that your brilliant diagnosis and brilliant treatment plan is spot on. But they just won't go there, fighting your also brilliant interventions tooth and nail. Of course, that can only mean one thing. Obviously, they're resistant. Couldn't possibly be that you might have perhaps missed the mark.

So I said to the new-agey healer person, hmm, so you're saying that anyone who has a serious illness is just out of alignment, or not willing to accept that health is their natural condition, or has unexplored anger issues, or something, anything other than just plain crappy luck? At this point she got a bit hesitant, and looking at me warily, responded, yes. Not that the other person is aware of it necessarily, she quickly added, sometimes this stuff is buried pretty deeply. Well I'll spare you the details of my response and just say that she got away from me as quickly as she possibly could after I finished my tirade.

A very good friend of mine works as an immigration attorney and she is really tired and frustrated and angry right now, because it seems that more and more we are falling back on the letter of the law and ignoring what is humane, and appropriate, and moral, and ethical, and might I add, the right thing to do. And we seem to have no problem in this society throwing people to the wolves. What worries me now is that as things get worse with our economy we will fall back on this black and white thinking mode, this notion that what happens to another person couldn't possibly happen to us, because we're just somehow better. The result being that a lot of people will be hurt or at least, not actively helped. Why do I think this will happen more and more? Because that whole concept of "fairness" is based in fear, real justifiable fear, that really any one of us could have something really shitty happen at any time. And there's nothing like the economy falling down around us, to get the fear juices flowing.

And it doesn't take too much thinking to come up with examples of what atrocities can happen when people are afraid for their own skin. You know, when "good people do nothing."